Israel Keeps Emergency Biometrics Measures in Place, More than a Year into Gaza War

Last year, on October 7th, a Hamas attack on Israel plunged the country into a war against Gaza that would bring chaos to the region. But aside from death and destruction, the war has also brought unprecedented access to biometric data to the Israeli government, sparking fears over privacy violations for Israelis.

Just one month after the attacks, the Knesset approved full access to the National Biometric Database for Israeli security forces using expedited legislation. The new access was not to be monitored by other government agencies. Since then, the Ministry of National Security has been regularly extending the temporary order despite the country’s regulators, legal experts and rights organizations arguing against its necessity.

“This legislation was enacted under difficult conditions, time pressure, and uncertainty,” the country’s Biometric Commissioner Naama Ben Zvi told Israeli media outlet Calcalist.

The database holds fingerprint and facial data of approximately 7 million Israelis. In the beginning, authorities argued that the biometric data was critical for identifying the deceased, kidnapped and missing during Hamas’s attack. Alongside the data access, the government also started mandating that citizens applying for an ID card or passport also submit fingerprint and facial biometrics.

According to data from the Biometric Commissioner, however, the fingerprint data was not indispensable. The biometric database helped identify 106 people out of 1,205 casualties, around 11 percent. The individuals were also identified using methods such as DNA, dental records and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) biometric databases which hold records from military conscripts.

“From a national perspective, fingerprints are not a significant game changer,” says Ben Zvi, who also heads the Identity and Biometric Applications Unit at the Israeli National Cyber Directorate. Citizens should be given a choice when submitting biometric data, she adds.

“Taking fingerprints from the entire population infringes on privacy.”

The Biometrics Commissioner is not the only one criticizing the government over privacy.

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China has Banned US Exports of Key Minerals for Computer Chips – Leaving Washington with Limited Options

China recently banned the export of the minerals gallium and germanium to the US amid growing tensions between the two countries on trade.

The minerals are of critical economic value because they are used in computer chips, in military technology such as night vision goggles, and in the renewable energy industry, where they are important for manufacturing electric vehicles and solar cells. All of these areas are very sensitive sectors for the US and EU.

China has overwhelming market power over supply, because it is the source of 98% of primary gallium and 91% of primary germanium. Primary refers to “raw” sources such as mineral ore. In several sectors where the minerals are used, there are no substitutes for them.

Gallium and germanium are present in very low concentration as byproducts of major minerals – they’re known as trace minerals. Germanium’s primary source is the residue from zinc refineries and coal fly ash (a powdered residue produced when coal is burnt in power plants).

Gallium is mainly produced as a byproduct of bauxite ore (which is the main source for aluminium) as well as the processing stage to extract aluminium from bauxite.

The Chinese ban on exports of these minerals to the US closely followed Washington’s third crackdown in three years on China’s semiconductor (computer chip) industry. The US wants to curb exports of advanced chips to China that could be used in applications that threaten America’s security.

For example, advanced chips could be used in electronic warfare applications that make use of artificial intelligence (AI), or in advanced weapons systems such as hypersonic missiles. China said its ban on gallium and germanium was because of the minerals’ “dual military and civilian uses”.

According to a report in Reuters in 2023, the US Department of Defense holds a strategic stockpile of germanium, but no reserves of gallium. In October 2024, the US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that a total ban on the export of gallium and germanium could result in a US$3.4 billion loss to US GDP.

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Ex-Mossad Agents Reveal Details Of How They Turned Hezbollah’s Communications Devices Into Bombs

Key details of the Israeli intelligence service’s operation targeting members of Hezbollah with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in September have been revealed. You can read our reporting of the first wave of explosions here, and the second wave here. Israel didn’t initially admit responsibility for the blasts but was always acknowledged to have been behind them — although exactly how it orchestrated them had remained mysterious.

The new information about the campaign was provided by two recently retired senior Mossad agents, who spoke with the 60 Minutes news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Both wore masks while interviewed and gave false names.

First, it’s worth recapping how the operations played out.

The first wave of explosions, on September 17, targeted pagers used by Hezbollah.

At around 3:30 p.m. local time, it seems the pagers were triggered simultaneously, by a specific message. The message was one that looked, at least, as if it was sent by Hezbollah leadership. The detonation then happened with a slight delay.

The second wave of explosions, on the following day, targeted walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.

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AI Drone Swarms And Autonomous Vessels: Palantir Co-Founder Warns How Warfare Is About To Change Forever

Billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale is urging for a shift in U.S. military strategy, criticizing the costly, failed attempts to rebuild nations like Afghanistan while championing tech-driven solutions.

Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir and investor in Anduril Industries, told podcast host Dave Rubin this week that he envisions a future where autonomous weaponized vessels, AI-powered drones, and microwave-based defense systems replace traditional combat, minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency. Lonsdale argued these innovations can protect American interests without spilling the blood of U.S. troops.

.@JTLonsdale Predicts The Future of Warfare: AI Drone Swarms, Autonomous Vessels, and Microwave Weapons

“We wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for… pic.twitter.com/ZADkbRs9ri

— CAPITAL (@capitalnewshq) December 22, 2024

DAVE RUBIN: Do you think technology can solve our [national security] problems? Wars are going to look very, very different from now. Even from what they look like right now.

JOE LONSDALE: This is a big thing. I think we wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for eliminating the bad guys. I was very against putting trillions of dollars into these areas to try to rebuild a broken civilization, which is not our job to do. We should have been building our civilization. I’m very pro-America, but part of being pro-America is fighting these wars without sacrificing American lives and keeping people very scared of us so that we don’t have to fight, and they do what they’re supposed to do. We have a bunch of companies right now that are kind of replacing the way the primes work. And so, for example, in the water, you want to have thousands or tens of thousands of smart and enabled autonomous weaponized vessels of different sorts that coordinate together. That’s what you want. And then, on the land, you know, we sent 31 tanks to Ukraine, and 20 destroyed.

For the same cost or even less, you could have sent 10,000 tiny little vehicles that are smart, have weapons on the fight, and are coordinated. There are all these new ways you can use mass production with advanced manufacturing and AI, and you don’t put American lives at risk. You turn the bad guys, and for much cheaper, you can do it.

Then the other one is really cool, just mentioned, we have the enemy also has, like, you see China where they fly hundreds of thousands of drones. It’s crazy. So we have something called Epirus, which is now deployed. It’s like a force field, but it’s a burst of microwave radiation in a cone. We can turn off hundreds of drones per shot from miles away.

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Israel Gives Biden His Marching Orders

My former CIA colleague Larry Johnson has a real ability to clarify the significance of the constantly growing deep dark hole that Joe “Mumbles” Biden, he of failing mental capacity, has hurled the American people into. Larry wrote on December 12th that

“There is still plenty of time before Donald Trump is inaugurated for Joe Biden’s team of cretins to start World War III. I think the biggest risk is that Israel may be emboldened to attack Iran and try to destroy sites, and may be encouraged to do so by the Biden lackeys. In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality. The collapse of the Assad regime has prompted a punishing military response from Israel, which has launched airstrikes at military targets across Syria and deployed ground troops both into and beyond a demilitarized buffer zone for the first time in 50 years.”

Given the destruction and partitioning of Syria, it has become impossible to consider United States foreign policy without some acceptance that it is driven and, in a sense, directed by Israel and Israel’s formidable domestic lobby in the US. “The Lobby,” as it is commonly referred to, controls both Congress and the White House on key issues and manages the media narrative in such a fashion as to make Israel the permanent victim, never the aggressor. Even though Israel is now marching in triumph across what remains of Syria and has indicated that it will be sticking around as an occupier, the move is being described as “temporary” and “defensive” by White House spokesmen. The Lobby’s success rests on the corruption that lots of money can buy, obvious to nearly everyone in politics, but a forbidden topic, sometimes referred to as an antisemitic “trope,” i.e. “Jews and money.” Israel’s role in managing the Joe Bidens and Donald Trumps is largely exercised in the broader Middle East but it also includes passionately supporting Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, a process derived in part from Jewish mythologizing and obtaining revenge for the alleged “pogroms” carried out in imperial Russia. Subsequent Jewish dominance of the Soviet intelligence and security services, which saw the killing of millions of Christians in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, are carefully excluded from the narrative.

In the latest bit of “mowing the grass” by the Israeli military, the country’s new Defense Minister Israel Katz told the press that the Israel Air Force (IAF) had carried out more than 480 strikes across Syria during the two days after the initial invasion, deliberately destroying most of Syria’s strategic weapon stockpiles. Meanwhile, the Israeli navy totally destroyed the Syrian fleet based at Latakia overnight. Katz hailed the operation as “a great success.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the day before, had called the rapid defeat of the Bashar al-Assad’s regime as “a new and dramatic chapter… The collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result of the severe blows with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran… we are changing the face of the Middle East.”

When informed of the initial invasion of al-Assad’s Syria by Israeli, Turkish, insurgent and US forces, Donald Trump said that the conflict was none of our business and it would be best to keep out of it. Hopefully that will be the policy after January 20th inauguration, but one recalls that Trump’s record of pandering to Israel is almost as bad as Biden’s, and he was the one who decided (admittedly under pressure from the Pentagon) to continue in 2017 the military occupation of a third of Syria that included its oil resources and its best agricultural land. Add in the crippling US and European sanctions on Damascus and one might argue that since that time Syrians have been poor and starving, causing refugee flows and hostility towards al-Assad government that contributed to the success of the recent uprising.

To be sure, many Syrians are celebrating the fall of an admittedly repressive, authoritarian, and corrupt Bashar al-Assad government. But other Syrians, particularly from hitherto protected minority groups like Christians, Alawites and Shiites, are now living in fear of or fleeing from the violent sectarian insurgents that have taken the place of President al-Assad. Christian Churches have already been looted and desecrated and warned not to hold Christmas services, not to sponsor Christmas parades, and not to display the image of St. Nicholas.

To be sure, fearing what is to come is legitimate as the “rebel” leader of the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Terror group, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who now goes by his given name Ahmed al-Shara, is a founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The US State Department has listed him as a terrorist as well as HTS as a terrorist group, and has placed a $10 million bounty on al-Jolani’s head, which presumably will soon be removed by Joe Biden. There is plenty of blood on al-Jolani’s hands and little in the way of evidence that he will not opt to slaughter those who he sees as his enemies, much of the killing being guided by the extreme religious groups that make up his followers. Indeed, there are already reports of group killings, including numerous soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army who surrendered rather than fight the insurgents.

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Israel to Annex the West Bank – Why Now? And What are the Likely Scenarios?

Israel is getting ready to annex the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The annexation will be a major step backward on the road to Palestinian freedom and will likely serve as a catalyst for a new Palestinian uprising.

Though annexation has been on the Israeli agenda for years, this time around a ‘great opportunity’ – in the words of extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – has presented itself and, from an Israeli point of view, cannot be missed.

“I hope we’ll have a great opportunity with the new US administration to create full normalization (of the Israeli occupation),” the minister was quoted as saying by Israeli media.

This is not the first time that Smotrich, among other Israeli extremists, has made the connection between Trump’s advent to the White House and the illegal expansion of Israel’s borders.

Two reasons make Israel’s far-right optimistic about Trump’s arrival: One, the Israeli experience during Trump’s first term in office, where the US president allowed Israel to claim sovereignty over illegal settlements, the Syrian Golan Heights, and occupied East Jerusalem; and, two, Trump’s more recent statement in the run-up to the election.

Israel is “so tiny” on the map, Trump said while addressing the pro-Israeli group ‘Stop Antisemitism’ at an event last August, wondering: “Is there any way of getting more?” The statement, absurd by any definition, caused joy among Israeli politicians, who understood it to be a green right for further annexations.

Israel’s aims for colonial expansion also received a boost in recent days. Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria, Israel immediately began invading large swathes of the country, reaching as far as the Quneitra governorate, less than 20 kilometers away from the capital, Damascus.

What is taking place in Syria serves as a model of what to expect in the West Bank in coming months.

Israel had occupied nearly 70 percent of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967. It cemented its illegal occupation of the Arab region by formally annexing it in 1981 through the so-called Golan Heights Law.

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Veteran Calls Out House Committee for Supporting Genocide

On Wednesday, 17-year veteran and intelligence officer Josephine Guilbeau disrupted the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs to call out the billions of dollars Congress sends to fund genocide in Gaza while neglecting veterans at home. Here is what she had to say:

“US Congress is complicit in the genocide in Gaza! You keep sending billions of dollars to Israel meanwhile veterans are homeless and committing suicide with more budget cuts on the way. As a 17-year veteran and intelligence officer, I am watching you destroy American values and jeopardize our national security.

Israel is burning children alive! Israel is burning children alive!

For one year, I have watched Israel burn children alive. You don’t care about veterans. You don’t care about American values. You are destroying this country –  shame on all of you! May God give you the moral courage to do the right thing! May God give you your hearts. Please! Please! Shame on you.”

After being expelled from the committee room, she made a plea to all US veterans:

“We need veterans from California all the way to New York to stand against what we are witnessing right now. Your voice is so powerful! We know as veterans that they are not giving us any of the help that we need while they send our tax dollars to other countries who are committing genocide. Right now is the time to use your powerful voices as veterans to say enough is enough. We need to save our country from what our own congressmen are doing right now! Free Palestine!”

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Syria’s new leader says all weapons to come under ‘state control’

Two weeks after seizing power in a sweeping offensive, Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa on Sunday said weapons in the country, including those held by Kurdish-led forces, would come under state control.

Sharaa spoke alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, after earlier meeting with Lebanese Druze leaders and vowing to end “negative interference” in the neighboring country.

Ankara-backed rebels played a key role in supporting Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which headed a rebel alliance that seized Damascus on Dec. 8, toppling longtime ruler Bashar Assad.

During a press conference with Fidan, Sharaa said Syria’s armed “factions will begin to announce their dissolution and enter” the army.

“We will absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control, whether from the revolutionary factions or the factions present in the SDF area,” he added, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

Sharaa traded in the olive-green military shirt he sported just days ago for a suit and tie during his meetings on Sunday at the presidential palace.

He also said “we are working on protecting sects and minorities from any attacks that occur between them” and from “external” actors exploiting the situation “to cause sectarian discord.”

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You Can’t Make This Up: U.S. Navy Shoots Down Its Own F/A-18 Super Hornet Fighter Jet in Apparent ‘Friendly Fire’ Incident in Red Sea

A U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an American F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident.

The two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet, assigned to the “Red Rippers” of Strike Fighter Squadron 11 from Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, had just launched from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman.

The USS Gettysburg, part of the same carrier strike group, erroneously identified the aircraft as a hostile target and engaged it, leading to its destruction.

“The guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18,” Central Command said in a statement.

The Navy’s Central Command confirmed that both pilots ejected safely, with one sustaining minor injuries.

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Houthi Hypersonic Missile Renders Iron Dome Useless, Slams Into Tel Aviv Area

Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched its second hypersonic missile attack on Israel in just days, striking the Tel Aviv area early Saturday morning. The attack marked a rare instance where a hypersonic weapon overwhelmed Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, underscoring the challenges posed by these new ultra-fast missiles. 

“Between the Yemeni Armed Forces regarding the implementation of a military operation targeting a military target of the Israeli enemy in the occupied Jaffa area with a hypersonic ballistic missile Palestine 2,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree announced on X. 

Footage post on X shows the failed interception of the hypersonic missile by the Iron Dome system. 

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